Why you might need to change the story when adapting it to anime

October 3, 2010

(For some context, see the previous entry, in
which this was originally a sidebar before it got too long.)

To put it one way, anime almost always gives you an external view of
characters and events, not an internal one (one where the character's
internal feelings and motivations are clear to the reader). Manga and
games let you give the reader a somewhat more internal view, and written
text lets you give them a fully internal view if you want to.

(You don't have to, of course; lots of written works are told from
various detached third-person perspectives.)

In a work written with this internal view available, the external events
may not make sense or may not be sufficiently convincing by themselves.
For example, it might only be clear how and why two characters fall
in love from an internal view; if you just have the external events,
it seems implausible or stupid. Since anime mostly strips away this
internal view, you are left only with the unconvincing external view; in
order to make the story make sense again you may need to add or change
external events to be more convincing and to better illustrate the
internal story.

(The other version of this is when a character is more sympathetic or
interesting because you see their internal perspective; if the story is
told purely from an outside perspective, they wind up looking unpleasant
or nasty or bad.)

There are at least two ways for an anime adaptation to fumble the
necessary story changes: it can simply do a bad or unconvincing job of
them, or it can do a good job of them that still doesn't fit in well
with the other external events and feels out of place, like something
awkwardly grafted in.

(The worst case is stories where the internal view is an intrinsic part
of how the story works, for example where the story being in first
person narration is fundamental and it would be very different in third
person. But I suspect that those don't get anime adaptations very often
or in fact at all.)